Marketers that invest in marketing automation should expect their roles to change, leaving behind the “art” that has been their stock in trade for one that is intensely scientific and analytical. Investing in marketing automation technology and its measurement capabilities has essentially changed marketing from a right-brain to a left-brain profession.

“Marketing is evolving in many ways; and, with the explosion of new channels, applications and social media, there is a greater need to get a complete view of the buyer,” said Paul Teshima, senior VP-product management at marketing automation software company Eloqua.

These are changes rooted not in technology, but in accountability, Teshima said.

“Marketers are increasingly being held responsible for revenue growth,” he said. “Executives are not interested in click-through and open rates but rather in how marketing is contributing to the bottom line.”

New marketing automation components are being added in response to marketers' demands, according to Maria Pergolino, director-marketing at marketing automation company Marketo Inc.

“The leading marketing automation providers have robust communities that allow customers to provide product feedback,” Pergolino said. “At Marketo, a new feature is often not considered until a customer makes a request for that feature and a number of other customers vote that it will be useful to them.

“Marketers who do take the time to contribute often feel more connected to the product and make better use of the new features because they are excited to see their ideas come to life,” she said.

Marketing automation these days can mean different things to different people. In the broadest sense, it may mean anything from simple spreadsheet analyses to software suites with a full array of Web analytics, lead-scoring, content management, nurturing and triggers offered.

Further, marketing automation is not evolving in a vacuum. Sales/marketing alignment—that long-sought after but elusive ideal—is considered essential to gaining automation's full rewards.

“If done right, marketing automation can strengthen the alignment between marketing and sales significantly,” said Matt West, senior director-marketing at marketing automation vendor Genius.com Inc. “Lead nurturing workflows determine and deliver automated responses to cultivate prospect interest, while real-time conversion events trigger real-time sales alerts and updates to database field values.

“Lead scoring increases as soon as prospects demonstrate the right level of interest through their online "body language,' ” West said.

Adam Blitzer, COO of Pardot, whose marketing automation solutions target small-to-midsize companies, agreed.

“In our experience, we've seen marketing automation work best when the sales teams are empowered to take full advantage of the marketing automation system,” Blitzer said. “This means they not only get the benefit of the tracking insight on their leads but also see real-time alerts on prospect activity and have the ability to add leads to targeted nurturing campaigns.

“Marketing automation allows marketing to control the messaging and maintain brand identity while giving sales an arsenal of resources to use,” Blitzer said.

Because marketing automation is a tool, marketers still need a strong foundation in marketing operations to maximize the use of that tool.

“It's difficult to change processes, from simply getting an email out to changing your whole thinking about buyer personas, buying cycles and more, “said Jeff Chamberlain, VP-b2b business solutions marketing at Aprimo Inc. He indicated that a marketing operations deployment can—and perhaps should—reform a marketing department, laying the groundwork for a comprehensive marketing automation implementation.

“It's pretty clear to me that marketing operations functions and software are still misunderstood,” Chamberlain said. “We firmly believe people will understand the need to go from concept to cash. Marketing doesn't start with a lead; it starts with an idea, executing on it and measuring it.”

Operations and sales integration are the hallmarks of successfully implemented marketing automation, according to Kristin Hambelton, VP-marketing at marketing automation company Neolane Inc.

“When Neolane customer F5 Networks set off to improve sales and marketing alignment, it started by studying process flows to determine where hand-offs were failing, where potentially good leads were being trapped and how clearly poor leads were getting into the inside sales reps' calling queues,” Hambelton said.

Hambelton said F5, a provider of IT networking solutions, automated its processing, scoring, distribution and reporting on lead flows and measured at all levels and conversion points of the demand flow to generate higher-quality leads, better conversion rates and lower costs-per-lead.

“The company worked to determine the role marketing automation could play to help it achieve objectives associated with overcoming those pain points,” Hambelton said.

Bryan Brown, director-product strategy at marketing automation vendor Silverpop, reiterated that the process is not essentially a technical one but rather a result of understanding how b2b buyers want to buy today.

“Buyers are only going to get more savvy and self-reliant, and social media will become more and more pervasive,” Brown said. “Buyers will continue to need you less while wanting you to be more helpful and more relevant than ever. Successful marketers will have to learn to be in more places more often. To achieve all of this, they will have to be more automated, be more social, and collect and act on comprehensive behavioral data in addition to traditional demographics.”

Brown recommended that marketers seek a vendor that understands social media and has tools in place to integrate multiple channels, including email, mobile, social and local.

“That will be key ... to capture contact behavior and then translate this insight into reports that show which campaigns or pieces of content were most effective in motivating prospects to take action,” Brown said.

One example is marketing automation company HubSpot, which last month teamed with PR Newswire to develop an optimized news release solution called iReach, which uses HubSpot analytics to help marketers better target their distribution, broaden their reach and enhance lead-generation strategies.

For the future, the increasing complexity of channels and the need to understand those and plan for their use are becoming more than a marketer can manage on the back of a napkin, or even in a decent spreadsheet analysis, according to Yuchun Lee, VP-enterprise marketing management, industry solutions at IBM Software Group, which oversees IBM's Unica marketing automation platform.

“Some estimates say that more than $1.5 trillion is being spent on marketing activities, ranging from advertising to direct mail and various forms of merchandising,” Lee said. “Online marketing and cross-channel marketing are increasingly becoming bigger and bigger portions of this huge pie.

“Moving forward, marketers must set goals for increasing website and digital interaction conversion rates; strive to better manage, integrate and leverage Web-related data; and use analytics to get the most insight from this valuable information,” Lee said.